On Saturday afternoon I wandered over to East River Park, a quiet, out-of-the way strip of grass next to a bunch of Lower-East Side project towers at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge, to see Vampire Weekend. Though their name might suggest otherwise, Vampire Weekend is actually not a second-rate industrial goth band. They are, in fact, made up of four prepped-out Columbia grads playing afro-beat inspired indie pop, who currently seem to have a lot more hype than they do actual fans. Despite having not more than a three-song EP available only on vinyl and the iTunes store, they've already been written up in the Times and plugged on pretty much every major music blog, and I can certainly see why (and they're apparently hip enough for this show to warrant an appearance by former Pavement bassist Mark Ibold). They play what essentially amounts to a lo-fi version of Graceland-era Paul Simon, which is to say they're playing saccharine pop melodies to the same African rhythms and harmonies that your parents thought were cool for a couple of years in the mid-80s. This might seem sort of lame, and it is, but it's also refreshing to see a band of upper-middle class white kids from the Northeast that aren't afraid to shy away from the fact that they're upper-middle class white kids from the Northeast. They have a kind of wide-eyed earnestness that's really kind of charming, without the cloying preciousness that seems to plague the majority of indie pop bands. I also enjoyed seeing a band that was so obviously young and unseasoned. They botched a few notes here and there, and I'm pretty sure the bassist was playing out of the same 100-watt amp that I owned in high school, but I'll be damned if they weren't loving every minute of it. They even managed to amass a fairly sizable dancing section near the front of the stage (and I mean real dancing, not that fake head nodding crap that hipsters in this town seem to think passes for self-expression. . . What?. . . No. . . I mean, I wasn't dancing. . . I'm too cool for that).
The following day, after a night of heavy drinking at the world's-largest-frat-party-meets-Oktoberfest known as the Bohemian beer garden in Astoria, I managed to drag myself out to Brooklyn for the Ted Leo/Thermals show at McCarren Park Pool. I met up with my friend EJ, who lives around the block and is apparently a regular at these events. The first thing I noticed was the fact that most of the people there didn't really seem very interested in the music. There was definitely a sizable group crowded around the stage with their attention on the bands, but they were outnumbered by the hordes on either side of the pool, intent on finding every way possible to turn this dilapidated slab of concrete into a hipster Neverland. Flanking the stage on the right was the dodgeball tournament (I had apparently arrived too late for kickball) and on the left was a slip-n- slide as well as some sort of oversize water volleyball game. I wasn't feeling ballsy enough to have a go at any of the competitive sports, but I did take a trip down the slip-n-slide, which was infinitely better designed than the crappy yellow tarps of my youth, and felt pretty good after standing in the 90-degree heat for a few hours.
The Thermals had just got on when I got there, who I'm not a huge fan of, but seemed to put on a decent show. With most of their songs lasting no more than 2 minutes, I was surprised they managed to fill up an hour set, but somehow they did it. Though, as much as I love 2-minute punk rock songs, they seemed a bit repetitive after a while, and there's only so much of the whiny Ben Gibbard-style vocals that I can stand. They saved their best songs for the end of the set (along with a spot-on cover of "Big Dipper" - the whiniest of all Built to Spill songs), and managed to somewhat redeem themselves.
When Ted Leo came out, he opened with "Sons of Cain", a fist-pumper from his most recent LP that got the crowd pretty well energized. He played a few other songs from his new album, which I haven't really listened to but sounded pretty good. I luckily managed to hear most of my favorite songs off Shake the Sheets and The Tyranny of Distance. Sadly there was no "Since U Been Gone/Maps", but we were treated to a bizarre mashup of "Little Dawn" and "One More Time" (which was entertaining, but also a painful reminder of the insane Daft Punk show I missed last week). If nothing else, I have to give Ted Leo credit for being one hard working motherfucker. For a guy thats now well into his thirties, he still knows how to rock better than the majority of acts ten years his junior (also, his performance on the Human Giant marathon is possibly the best handling of an equipment malfunction that I've ever seen).
Unfortunately, I had to leave the show a little early to head back into the city to catch Theremin, a play at the NY Fringe Festival that Erin's friend Anna was in the original cast for and used to date the writer/lead actor of. The play tells the semi-true story of Leon Theremin, the Russian inventor responsible for the first electronic musical instrument that bares his name. To give the story a little twist, it's all told through the eyes of post-Beach Boys Brian Wilson, who is in an insane asylum trying to piece together the life of the instrument and its creator. Hats off to Ben Lewis and Duke Doyle (who you may remember for his two-second role as Kevin Bannister in High Fidelity), the co-writers and lead actors in the play, for successfully weaving together science, music, and history, and not making it seem at all boring or contrived. The play gets a little muddled at points (Brian Wilson was a nut-job, what do you expect), but the writing and acting are pretty amazing for a play that these guys initially put on when they were still at BU. Plus the live theremin playing kicks ass.
